Edited by Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman, Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) explores architecture’s role in the repression of democracy. The book assembles essays from global scholars examining how architecture has been used to further authoritarian agendas, with detailed case studies from across the world. Cornell AAP professors Esra Akcan and María González Pendás will discuss their contributions alongside other essayists. As challenges to democracy intensify, this event revisits architecture’s complicity in anti-democratic politics, celebrating the book’s fresh perspective on how the built environment has been employed as an instrument of authoritarian power. With nationalism and authoritarianism on the rise globally, Architecture Against Democracy offers new insights into the political dimensions of architectural design and historical writing.

Claire Zimmerman

Claire Zimmerman is a historian of architecture, industrialization, and mediation at the University of Toronto. Her recent book, Albert Kahn, Inc.: Architecture, Labor, Industry, 1905-1961 (2025), explores the intersection of labor and architecture. She co-edited Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (2024) and Detroit Moscow Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (2023). She is currently co-editing a project on property and architecture, contributing to a network on the costs of architecture, and leading the PhD program in Architecture, Landscape, and Design at Toronto.

Esra Akcan

Esra Akcan is a Professor at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture. Her books include Landfill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, and Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (with S. BozdoÄŸan). She has written over 200 scholarly articles and is co-editor of Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (with I. Dadi). Her forthcoming book, Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism and Architecture After Conflicts and Disasters, explores the architecture of post-conflict rebuilding.

Reinhold Martin

Reinhold Martin is a historian of architecture, technology, and media at Columbia University. His latest book, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (2021), examines the role of media and materiality in shaping educational institutions. He co-edited Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (2024) with Claire Zimmerman. Martin is currently writing two books: one on the intersection of energy, utility, and use-value in the 20th-century technosphere, and another on philosophical aesthetics in modern architecture.

María González Pendás

María González Pendás is an architectural historian at Cornell University, specializing in modernity, coloniality, and the Spanish transatlantic world. Her research focuses on the architectural dimensions of fascism, race, and religion, particularly in the context of Hispanidad. She co-edited Pious Technologies and Secular Designs (2022) and is working on two books: Holy Modern, examining fascist reimaginings of architecture in postwar Spain, and a study of labor, politics, and concrete technologies in developmentalist Mexico.

Time: 6:30-8:30 pm EST

Free!

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